Twitter Hacked by "Iranian Cyber Army"

By
Dan Hope Dec 18th, 2009

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Proving the vulnerability of the Internet, a group calling themselves the “Iranian Cyber Army” has hijacked one of the most popular microblogging sites in the world: Twitter. Late last night, the Twitter site was replaced with the image above and the following message.

Iranian Cyber Army
THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY
iRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COM

U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But THey Don’t, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples To….
NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA?
WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST [winking emoticon]
Take Care.

Afterwards the site went down for a while, along with status.twitter.com. Service is fully restored now, but it’s unclear how much, if any, damage was done. Some experts suggest changing your Twitter password to be safe.

No one is sure who the Iranian Cyber Army is, or if it is even a group of Iranian activists or just a hoax.

The attack appeared to be a DNS redirect, meaning the attackers didn’t take control over the Twitter site or servers, they simply redirected traffic to the page seen above.

“Twitter's DNS records were temporarily compromised tonight but have now been fixed," said Twitter cofounder Biz Stone. "As some noticed, Twitter.com was redirected for a while but API and platform applications were working. We will update with more information and details once we've investigated more fully.”

Many people are not surprised at the attack for two reasons. First, many Iranians denounce the social networking site because it was used to relay information and coordinate groups during presidential election riots in the country. It makes sense that angry Iranians would target the site. Secondly, Twitter is well known to be lax in security. Until now, the site has had little reason to be more particular about security, especially since it generally doesn’t house as much sensitive information about users as other social networking sites (e.g. Facebook).